Abstract
Late in his career, Thomas S. Kuhn practiced more as a philosopher of science than as a historian of science. However, his earlier work—leading up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and during the majority of his tenure in the Princeton history of science group—focused on “mapping” the shape of the history of the physical sciences and on modeling the dynamics, or “motor,” of scientific traditions. This paper examines the younger Kuhn’s excursions in map and motor design. It views Kuhn as a “critical historian,” that is, a historian who constructs explanatory categories in order to apply them to large-scale narratives, evaluation of which can suggest modification of those guiding categories.
The younger Kuhn’s map and motor design was largely shaped by the work of his historiographical idol, Alexandre Koyré. Kuhn’s creative articulation of Koyré’s position explains his innovations concerning Scientific Revolutions (plural), his loosening of Koyré’s central category of “metaphysics,” and his invention of the crucial conception of “normal science.” Additionally, Kuhn’s devotion to Koyré explains some historiographical pitfalls and blind spots that bedeviled his historical work: for example, his ignoring early modern natural philosophizing as an institution and culture in its own right and his failure to capitalize on his correct insight into the nature of scientific discovery as the nonrevolutionary yet tradition-modifying core process in the sciences. The paper is concerned with Kuhn’s work as a critical historian and his legacy for younger historians, not with philosophical debates about his texts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hereafter cited as SSR, from the 2nd edition of Kuhn (1970). The first edition was published in 1962.
- 2.
One could take the terminus point for Kuhn’s activity as a critical historian as 1977, with the publication of Kuhn (1977a) and particularly the essay, Kuhn (1977c), which first appeared in 1976. In 1979, Kuhn moved to MIT., but he had been on leave and away from Princeton quite a bit in the previous two years. I restrict the use of the term “young” for Kuhn up through 1962. “Younger” covers that period and on through 1977.
- 3.
Any field of history, including history of science, consists of two interacting levels: One is where we craft together our public, published products—narratives imprinted with explanations of what was happening and why. The other level is where one designs the categories that are being both applied and revised in our narrative/explanations. Some areas of history require more concentrated attention to that second level than others—history of science is one of them. Hence, a critical historian is one who explicitly attends to the formation of categories and evaluates the goodness of the narrative/explanations in which they are deployed, with an eye to modification and improvement. The younger Kuhn certainly was a critical historian, especially concerned with the legacy of Koyré.
- 4.
I was a graduate student in the Princeton Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History, from September 1969 to August 1973. From September 1973 to July 1974, I was an “instructor” in the HPS Program and the Department of History. Michael S. Mahoney was the chief supervisor of my doctoral dissertation, Descartes and the Scientific Revolution : An Interpretation, and Kuhn was co-supervisor. In August 1974, I began my first regular academic appointment in the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds. Its senior member, Jerome R. Ravetz , was a keen student of the work of Kuhn, and his seminal, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (1971), had enlarged and improved the Kuhnian model for “normal science ” in ways paralleling the contemporary initial development of post-Kuhnian interpretative sociology of scientific knowledge , in the hands of scholars such as Mulkay (1979), Collins (1975), Barnes (1974, 1982), and Shapin (1982, 1992). My first comment on these Kuhn/post-Kuhn developments was Schuster (1979).
- 5.
- 6.
I am not suggesting that Kuhn himself was accomplished in social, political, or economic history. He was not, and he often pointed that out to the graduate students, telling us explicitly that whatever history of science problem we worked on, we would require gigantic loadings of knowledge of “context, context, context,” knowledge he was in no position to impart.
- 7.
Kuhn gave early expression to his appreciation of Koyré’s contribution to the maturation of the history of science profession in Kuhn (1977b, e). These essays are cited as reprinted in Kuhn (1977a). They were each originally produced in 1968. When Kuhn addressed each year’s crop of new history of science graduate students, he would make a point of bringing in his well-worn, pre-World War II copy of Koyré’s Études galiléennes [the English translation only appeared in 1978]. He would intone, “Nobody is leaving here until they have read all of this.” Presumably he would know from one’s work whether the exercise had been done.
- 8.
- 9.
For the emerging Anglophone profession of history of science following World War II, Koyré’s treatment of Galileo (Koyré 1939, 1978), then only available in its original prewar French edition, became the exemplar of how to practice the history of science.
- 10.
Koyré (1956). As we shall see, this principle was followed and deepened by Kuhn, especially through his insistence that a large segment of any living scientific research tradition was passed onto apprentices and applied by them, in the form of tacit, craftsperson-like “knowledge.”
- 11.
There is more to say about Koyré on Galileo’s experimentation, which we defer to Sect. 19.5.
- 12.
Whether and how Koyré’s historiography handles the contexts of his great revolutionary figures is a more complex issue than it may appear at first sight. See Barnes 1974, Chapter 4 for a brilliant and suggestive early post-Kuhnian discussion. For example, it has been noted, by Barnes and others, that Koyré’s notion of the “metaphysical framework” embraces the intellectual and philosophical “contexts” of science. This has prompted the question of whether Koyré was an internalist or externalist. That question however is misplaced. It is just a matter of the location of what we may in post-Kuhnian terminology call the cognitive/social frontier (Schuster 2000, p. 335).
- 13.
Koyré and Kuhn had their own problem with a different species of Whiggism, which was built into their respective approaches and little noted until the emergence of post-Kuhnian discussions in the 1970s and 1980s, as we shall see later, Sect. 19.10 and Note 44.
- 14.
In his overview of how history of science had evolved, Kuhn indicated that reading Koyré and other early philosophically acute historians such as Emile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg crystallized his ability to sympathize with outmoded structures of thought, such as Aristotle’s. They showed him that past philosophical and scientific systems have their own sui generis rationality, coherence, and cogency which the historian must penetrate (Kuhn 1977b, p. 11; 1977e, p. 108).
- 15.
Anyone who has taught entry-level history of science knows import of this premise as well as students’ proclivity to slip, even when doing history, into talk about Science, capital S. However, if properly introduced, it transforms their reading of historical and philosophical literatures that miss this point. See Schuster 1995a, Chapter 15, p. 155; 2013b, pp. 284–285.
- 16.
Kuhn’s views on the tacit component of paradigms are usually linked to those of Polanyi (1958), whom he cites in this connection early in SSR (44 n. 1). Recently doubt has been cast upon the reliability of Kuhn’s recollections about the timing and import of his reading of Polanyi (Jacobs 2009). The earliest and most impressive post-Kuhnian articulation of the theme of scientists’ activity as “craftsmen’s work” was in Ravetz (Ravetz 1971), who interestingly mainly cites Polanyi in this connection rather than Kuhn (see Ravetz’s index entries on Kuhn and Polanyi). It is also important to note that while the Kuhn/Koyré anti-method position is extremely important for the historiography of science , it did not go far enough. That is, they left the issue of method as one of ironic denial. They did not ask why scientists regularly profess to believe in a general scientific method, what political and rhetorical roles such belief plays, and how “method talk” functions as a misleading species of discourse. See Schuster 1986, 2013a, pp. 70–77, pp. 265–273.
- 17.
For an explication of the phases in Kuhn’s model of revolution, its onset, process, and resolution, see further Schuster 1995a, Chapter 16, pp. 161–165. This exposition is aimed to help entry level students of history or sociology of science, not particularly to facilitate participation in the philosophical debate about Kuhn on revolution. Note also that Kuhn’s conception of the “first paradigm,” founding a new disciplinary tradition, poses its own problems, and we shall deal with this in Sect. 19.10.
- 18.
This is apparent in the status accorded to Aristotelian-backed Ptolemaic astronomy as a competitive paradigm. For a textbook treatment of how Kuhn released the constraints on what might be construed as the metaphysics of a given paradigm, see Schuster 1995a, Chapter 11, Chapter15, p. 157 and Schuster 2013b, pp. 193–208, pp. 290–291.
- 19.
“Galilean epistemology […] is both a priorist and experimentalist at one and the same time (one could even say that it is the latter because it is the former) [….] [ Galileo’s] experiments…are designed on a theoretical basis and of which the function is to confirm or refute the application to reality of laws deduced from principles which themselves have a quite different basis” (Koyré 1978, p. 106).
- 20.
Kuhn 1977h, Schuster 1979, pp. 305–306. Koyré of course knew that “strict agreement” between experimental results and mathematically mediated theoretical predictions is “strictly impossible” (Koyré , 1978, p. 107). Rather, Galileo , who according to Koyré knew this as well, “[…] was not at all looking to found his theory [of motion] on facts gained in the realm of experience: he knew perfectly well that this is impossible. […]. Experiment can confirm that [a theoretical assumption] is a good assumption. It can do this within its limited means; or rather, within the limits of our means” (ibidem).
- 21.
In effect, Kuhn started from Koyré’s skepticism about the possibility of strict agreement of data with prediction and opened a realm of social and historical inquiry into exactly what the level of expectation about theory/data “gap” was in a given discipline at a given moment. Post-Kuhnians then focused on the continual possibility of renegotiating that level in the course of consequential work (i.e., creative normal science , possibly leading to paradigm-modifying “discoveries”). Thus, in SSK, the two strands of Kuhnian insight—which Kuhn had relegated to the margin of his thought—about discovery [which we discuss in the next section] and about reasonable agreement in experiment were woven into a broader vision of studying the micro-politics of testing and negotiation of the significance of claimed “results.” The works of Collins (Collins 1975) and Pinch (Pinch 1985) are canonical in this regard. See Schuster 1995b, Chapter 6, for a textbook treatment of the politics of testing, devised in the wake of Collins’ and Pinch’s work.
- 22.
Kuhn 1977i, originally published in 1964, especially, p. 251.
- 23.
Again, these ideas of significant conceptual change in the course of normal science accord with Kuhn’s ideas about experimental testing (Kuhn 1977h) and his pre-SSR view of significant discovery within normal research (Kuhn 1977g) to be discussed below. Taken together, these three themes foreshadow more the subsequent development of SSK than the contents of SSR.
- 24.
There was one other area where the younger Kuhn innovated about experiment, beyond Koyré: following Popper , Kuhn saw that test results were often offered as “proof” of the falsity of one paradigm and truth of its competitor. But Kuhn had looked sufficiently closely at experiment as an expert enterprise and at cases of theory debate, to conclude that “crucial” tests did not in themselves determine the outcome of theory contestations, the Popperian position. Kuhn held instead that “crucial tests” were offered as evidence, among other evidence and argument, by one side in its contest for support against its opponents. Crucial tests were a phenomenon within a wider cognitive and social process of heightened theory debates, not the determinative end points of them.
- 25.
Kuhn (1977a, Preface pp. 17–18) tells us that his paper on “Function for Measurement” (Kuhn 1977h) was largely finished by spring of 1958. Kuhn says it comes very close to describing what became “normal science,” adding, “Though I had recognized for some years that periods governed by one or another traditional mode of practice must necessarily intervene between revolutions, the special nature of that tradition–bound practice had in large part previously escaped me.”
- 26.
- 27.
“The continuation of a form of culture implies mechanisms of socialization and knowledge transmission, procedures for displaying the range of accepted meanings and representations, methods of ratifying acceptable innovations and giving them the stamp of legitimacy. All of these must be kept operative by members of the culture themselves [...]. When there is a continuing form of culture there must be sources of cognitive authority and control. Kuhn was initially almost alone among historians in giving serious attention to these features of science. The result of this attention […] is to display just how profound and pervasive is the significance of the sub-culture in science, and the communal activity of the organized groups of practitioners who sustain it. The culture is far more than the setting for scientific research; it is the research itself [...]. Science is not a set of universal standards... Scientific standards themselves are part of a specific form of culture” (Barnes 1982, pp. 9–10; see also Barnes 1972). The English sociologist M. D. King (1971) had incisively made related points around the same time: addressing specifically Kuhn’s paper on the “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery” (Kuhn 1977g) which we are about to discuss, King observed that the paper issued a revolutionary challenge to positivist philosophy of science and to orthodox Mertonian sociology of science. It threatened the latter by hinting that the object of study in the sociology of science is not the cluster of transtheoretical Mertonian social norms of science, but rather the institutional, social, and political processes by which explanatory frames are produced, maintained, and altered by significant (but not catastrophic) discovery.
- 28.
This view appeared early in the SSK tradition: Jerry Ravetz (1971) articulated Kuhn at length in this way; I later suggested such an SSK articulation of Kuhn (Schuster 1979). And, of course, this is what Barnes (1982) did so brilliantly. Barnes also devoted a chapter to exposition of this emerging post-Kuhnian conception of discovery, which per force entailed erosion of the stark normal versus revolutionary science dichotomy.
- 29.
The paper in question (Kuhn 1977g) is the first in the “meta-history” part of The Essential Tension.
- 30.
We see this happening in SSR, especially Chapter 6 ‘Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries.” Here an elaborated version of Kuhn’s (1977g) account of discovery is offered [mainly] as a moment in the account of anomaly and the emergence of new paradigms. He offers the oxygen/phlogiston case, as in Kuhn (1977g), but now of course it subserves a model of revolution; he offers the case of the Leyden jar, which subserves an account of emergence of a “first paradigm” in electrical science [cf. Sects. 19.10 and 19.11], and he offers the case of Roentgen and x-rays, an example where paradigm change was not immediately in the offing. There is a vestige of the original sense of discovery at Kuhn (1970, pp. 52–53): “[The process of discovery] then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected.” Readers concentrating on the stock Kuhnian theory of revolution may well read right through that passage, as I did many times, before I reread it in the light of Kuhn (1977g) and the emergence of the SSK approach to discovery. It is then clear that Kuhn is slipping back toward a view of potentially creative normal science . But the opportunity is lost as the chapter and book flow on with the model of revolution (the next chapter is titled “Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories” and the one after that “The Response to Crisis”).
- 31.
Kuhn lacked the interest in micro-sociology or to be precise Schutzian phenomenological sociology, to go further with this. Many of the early SSK scholars drew upon Schutz in particular (Schutz 1970; Schutz and Luckmann 1973). Kuhn always seemed devoted to Parsonian/Mertonian structural/functional, large-scale normative and consensual views of groups and institutions.
- 32.
Moreover, late in his career, after years of rejecting the work of SSK, Kuhn wrote a piece that again seems to return to that earlier point of accepting what had been his own proto-SSK position. He reflects on the intervening development, but then leaves his position up in the air, not cashing out the conclusions, such as others had already done by the early 1980s! (Kuhn 2000).
- 33.
This is not to say that SSK devotees were broadly committed to developing general historical models of motors and applying them to large mappings and narratives in the history of scientific practice. Barnes and Shapin were, but many were not.
- 34.
Here I take “incommensurability” to mean “there is no single, agreed, and overriding criterion of goodness accepted by both sides,” rather than “there are no criteria at all available to the two sides,” thereby defusing philosophical anxieties and allowing us to get on with historiographical discussion. On how to interpret “incommensurability” in Kuhnian theory without falling into complete irrationality, see Schuster 1995a, Chapter 16, pp. 164–165; 2013b, pp. 304–305. On the “competing teams” conceit and a figural representation thereof, see Schuster 1995a, Chapter 25, pp. 236–237, and figure 4, p. 240; Schuster 2013b, pp. 482–483.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
I first emphasized this point in Schuster (1990) and Schuster and Watchirs (1990). Much earlier Robert Lenoble (Lenoble 1943) put the conflict of varieties of natural philosophy onto the map of the Scientific Revolution . Kuhn owned a first edition of this work—as I learned when I borrowed his copy, since it was not in Princeton’s Firestone Library. Lenoble was followed in the 1960s by P. M Rattansi (Rattansi 1964). Later Easlea (Easlea 1980) and Ravetz (Ravetz 1975) tried to popularize this view. My early work followed from these initiatives and from discussions with my then Cambridge colleague Andrew Cunningham , circa 1978–1979. Later attempts to delineate the category of natural philosophy include Andrew Cunningham (Cunningham 1988, 1991), Cunningham and Williams (Cunningham and Williams 1993), Peter Dear (Dear 2001), and Peter Harrison (Harrison 2000, 2002).
- 40.
It is important to note that such articulation existed in the relation even of Aristotelianism to Ptolemaic astronomy , regardless of what the strictest Aristotelians might have said. The fine details and elaborate geometrical tools of Ptolemaic astronomy fell outside any plausible realistic interpretation, offered merely appearance-saving geometrical models, and could not provide natural philosophical explanations in terms of matter and cause. However, the fundamental concepts of Ptolemaic astronomy were shaped by Aristotelian natural philosophy: the finite Earth-centered cosmos, the distinction between the celestial and the terrestrial realms, and the primacy of uniform circular motion.
- 41.
“Hot spot” like “articulation” is a term of art in my model of the dynamics natural philosophy. Schuster 2013a, Chapter 2, section 2.5.4.
- 42.
For example, Kuhn speaks of atomism as a “new intellectual ingredient” providing the metaphysics of the cluster of classical sciences.
- 43.
- 44.
I say “almost Whiggishly” because what we have here is a specifically Koyréan/Kuhnian variant of Whiggism. Kuhn and Koyré each rightly claimed that they did not practice the form of (inductivist and often “method-based”) Whiggish narrative which they often criticized in others. Nevertheless, where Koyré had invoked a kind of destiny toward mature, comprehensive mathematization under his preferred ruling “Platonic” metaphysics , Kuhn played a Koyréan variation, with each first paradigm in an experimental field harboring a destiny toward mature and comprehensive mathematization.
- 45.
Material in the next five paragraphs derives from Schuster and Watchirs (1990).
- 46.
Similarly, in discussing pre-paradigm schools in physical optics, Kuhn (1970, pp.12–13), even observes that they each had different respective “paradigmatic observations.”
- 47.
He continues, “Many of the attributes of a developed science which I have associated with the acquisition of a paradigm I would therefore now discuss as consequences of the acquisition of the sort of paradigm that identifies challenging puzzles, supplies clues to their solution, and guarantees that the truly clever practitioner will succeed” (ibidem).
- 48.
In effect, Kuhn still needed a rupture, a transition to maturity, but he was left with two weak indicators of its supposed occurrence: relatively greater consensus—the end of interschool debate—apparently dependent upon relatively greater puzzle-defining and puzzle-solving power (which also instills confidence). But, given the paradigm-like virtues of the pre-paradigm schools, it is still not possible to see, in Kuhn’s terms, why and how such points of superiority are made out and enforced upon the debating parties.
- 49.
Material on Bachelard in this paragraph evolved from findings first put forward in Schuster and Watchirs (1990, pp. 7–11, pp. 21–25). A fully articulated, pedagogical model of how thus to deal with the issue of the theory loading of experimental hardware is presented in my textbooks: Schuster 1995a, Chapter 14, pp. 145–146 and Schuster 2013b, pp. 269–77.
- 50.
All this goes well beyond the insights of Popper , Hanson , and then Kuhn about “theory loading” of experience and experiment. Arguably, it was Bachelard , not Kuhn or the others, who specifically stimulated the efflorescence of SSK inquiry into experiment.
- 51.
Material in the remainder of this section was first presented in Schuster and Watchirs 1990, pp. 14–29.
- 52.
- 53.
For case of electro-statics up to, through and beyond Franklin , Schuster and Watchirs (1990, pp. 30–36).
References
Bachelard G (1949) Le rationalisme appliqué. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
Bachelard G (1938) La Formation de l’Esprit Scientifique. Vrin, Paris.
Barnes B (1972) Sociological Explanation and Natural Science: A Kuhnian Reappraisal. Archives Européennes de sociologie 13:373–391.
Barnes B (1974) Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. Routledge & Kegan, London.
Barnes B (1982) T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. MacMillan, London.
Collins HM (1975) The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon. Sociology 9:205–224.
Cunningham A (1988) Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19:365–389.
Cunningham A (1991) How the Principia got its Name. Or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously. History of Science 24:377–392.
Cunningham A, Williams P (1993) De–Centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science. British Journal for the History of Science 26:407–432.
Dear P (2001) Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy: Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32:377–386.
Easlea B (1980) Witch–Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to the Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450–1750. Harvester Press, Sussex.
Hanson NR (1958) Patterns of Discovery. The Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Harrison P (2000) The Influence of Cartesian Cosmology in England. In Gaukroger S, Schuster J, Sutton J (eds). Descartes’ Natural Philosophy. Routledge, London, pp. 168–192.
Harrison P (2002) Voluntarism and Early Modern Science. History of Science 40:63–89.
Jacobs S (2009) Thomas Kuhn’s Memory. Intellectual History Review 19/1:83–101.
King MD (1971) Reasons, Tradition and the Progressiveness of Science. History and Theory 10:3–31.
Koyré A (1939) Études Galiléennes. Hermann, Paris. English. [Koyré A (1978) Galileo Studies. The Harvester–Hassocks, Sussex].
Koyré A (1956) The Origins of Modern Science. Diogenes 16:1–22.
Koyré A (1955) A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 45/4:329–395.
Koyré A (1973). The Astronomical Revolution. Methuen, London. [From: original French Edition 1961]
Kuhn TS (1957) The Copernican Revolution. Vintage, New York.
Kuhn TS (1963) The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research. In Crombie AC (ed). Scientific Change. Heineman, London, pp. 347–369.
Kuhn TS (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kuhn TS (1977a) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kuhn TS (1977b) The Relations between the History and the Philosophy of Science. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 3–20.
Kuhn TS (1977c) Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 31–65.
Kuhn TS (1977d) Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 66–104.
Kuhn TS (1977e) The History of Science. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 105–126.
Kuhn TS (1977f) The Relations between History and the History of Science. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 127–161.
Kuhn TS (1977g) The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 165–177.
Kuhn TS (1977h) The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 178–224.
Kuhn TS (1977i) A Function for Thought Experiments. In Kuhn 1977a, pp. 240–265.
Kuhn TS (2000) The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science. In Conant J, Haugeland J (eds). The Road Since Structure. Thomas S. Kuhn. Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 105–120.
Lakatos I, Musgrave A (1970) (eds) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Lenoble R (1943) Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme. Vrin, Paris.
Merton RK (1970) Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. Harper & Row, New York. [Original publication in: Merton RK 1938, Science, technology, and society in seventeenth-century England. Osiris 4:360–632].
Mulkay M (1979) Science and the Sociology of Knowledge. Allen & Unwin, London.
Pinch T (1985) Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: the Externality and Evidential Significance of Observational Reports in Physics. Social Studies of Science 15:3–36.
Polanyi M (1958) Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Popper KR (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Basic Books, London.
Rabb TK (1975) The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, New York.
Rattansi PM (1964) The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Seventeenth Century England. Ambix 12:1–23.
Ravetz JR (1971) Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ravetz JR (1975) Entry: Science, History of. Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th edition. Vol. 16. pp. 366–372.
Schuster JA (1979) Kuhn and Lakatos Revisited. British Journal for the History of Science 12:301–317.
Schuster JA (1986) Cartesian Method as Mythic Speech: A Diachronic and Structural Analysis. In Schuster JA, Yeo RR (eds). The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 33–95.
Schuster JA (1990) The Scientific Revolution. In Olby RC, Cantor GN, Christie JRR, Hodge MJS (eds). The Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge, London, pp. 217–242.
Schuster JA (1995a) The Scientific Revolution: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science. Open Learning Australia. Located at http://descartes-agonistes.com/
Schuster JA (1995b) An Introduction to the History and Social Studies of Science. Open Learning Australia. Located at http://descartes-agonistes.com/
Schuster JA (2000) Internalist and Externalist Historiographies of the Scientific Revolution. In Applebaum W (ed). Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution. Garland Publishing, New York.
Schuster JA (2002) L’Aristotelismo e le sue Alternative. In Garber В (ed). La Rivoluzione Scientifica. Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma, pp. 337–357.
Schuster JA (2013a) Descartes–Agonistes: Physico–Mathematics, Method and Corpuscular–Mechanism, 1619–1633. Springer, Dordrecht.
Schuster JA (2013b) 科学革命: 科学史与科学哲学导论. (上海科学技术出版社, 上海) [The Scientific Revolution: Introduction to the History & Philosophy of Science; Translated by An Weifu]. Shanghai Scientific and Technological Education Publishing, Shanghai.
Schuster JA (2013c) What was the relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy. In Gal O, Chen-Morris R (eds). Science in the Age of Baroque. Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 208:13–45.
Schuster JA, Watchirs G (1990) Natural Philosophy, Experiment and Discourse: Beyond the Kuhn/Bachelard Problematic. In Le Grande HE (ed). Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 1–47.
Schuster JA, Taylor ABH (1997) Blind Trust: The Gentlemanly Origins of Experimental Science. Social Studies of Science 27:503–536.
Schuster JA, Brody J (2013) Descartes and Sunspots: Matters of Fact and Systematising Strategies in the Principia Philosophiae, Annals of Science 70/1:1–45.
Schutz A (1970) Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Schutz A, Luckmann T (1973) The Structures of the Life-World. Heinemann, London.
Shapin S (1982) History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions. History of Science 20:157–211.
Shapin S (1992) Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science As Seen Through the Externalism-Internalism Debate. History of Science 30:333–369.
Stone L (1972) The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642. Harper and Row, New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schuster, J.A. (2018). The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Following Koyré: The Younger Tom Kuhn, “Critical Historian,” on Tradition Dynamics and Big History. In: Pisano, R., Agassi, J., Drozdova, D. (eds) Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61712-1_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61712-1_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61710-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61712-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)